I made a tape a few weeks ago, though it took me more than a while to
actually finish it with the last few songs. I'm not completely pleased
with it, but it is still enjoyable to listen to. I'll give my extra copy
to the first person in the Twin Cities who drops me a line. Here are the contents.

Autechre - "Rae"
It seems every time I listen to this, I immediately wonder how it could be
that I will stay interested in it. But the deceleration that keeps up
through the track is deceptive. At first it seems like a sort of simpleminded
trick. But after time it doesn't feel uniform; there are pushes and pulls,
tiny elongations and compressions of time that leave me, generally, wanting
to hear what happens until the end. (But: I still tune out sometimes.)

Brian Eno - "Everything Merges with the Night"
I suppose I chose this because I love Another Green World, and
this song in particular, and had been playing the record constantly
in January and February. But I recall thinking it would be a really good
idea to follow the Autechre track with the Clipse track, but that I
couldn't do that because it would be too much too soon and I wouldn't
be sure where to go after that. Or maybe I thought the tape needed a
break after "Rae", what with my constant initial doubts about its ability
to maintain my interest. Despite being, happily, shown to be wrong. Anyway,
this track doesn't do quite what I wanted, maybe because I didn't turn
my stereo up loud enough today to check. On headphones I always play
Another Green World as loud as I can (it's mastered too low),
to make things like the guitars here (sort of hovering and swooping in,
surging, constantly) sound as resonant as possible.

Clipse - "When the Last Time"
When I am listening around other people, Pharrell's opening ("niggas and
bitches! you are now listening to the sound..." etc.) gives me a start.
It doesn't when I'm by myself.

Tricky - "Christiansands"
Every time I go to Cheapo, I resent Tricky slightly, along with all the
other acts that have been chosen by the market as the representatives
of "electronica" (the divider in the store says "club" but I just know
that's what people think when they go by Tricky's bin, unless they think
"trip-hop", whatever), for filling up my precious store space with
records I don't want. Then again, he made this.

Jimi Hendrix - "Manic Depression"
In general I make tapes the way I did my radio shows, which is to think
a little bit first, gather some records together, then choose songs to
play as they come to me, and record them as they come, all in one sitting.
On radio shows, partly to combat my careening eclecticism (for the sake
of my listeners), partly just to make for nice transitions (for the
sake of my listeners, and because it made me happy), I tended to choose
songs that made for nice sonic juxtapositions. This made for runs of
songs in a similar genre, or similar mood, or just with a common thread
(not a very thick one) running through them. But in contrast, for tapes
I feel more of a compulsion to avoid runs like that. Longer than two
songs and I start worrying. One thing I do, unreflectively, is start
thinking that some kind of theme (usually title-based or lyric-based,
but never on very close readings of the lyrics) might get me out of my
dilemma. But I never really think about these themes for more than a
song or three, and I never consider them in detail, so I make confused
choises like the one to juxtapose "Manic Depression" with a Tricky song.
I like this song, but it feels out of place here because one of my other
compulsions is to make tapes that feel like honest representations of what
I've been listening to lately, and I never ever listen to Hendrix any
more. I didn't even remember that there was a guitar solo in the song -
in my head I just hear the back and forth between the main guitar part,
the drums, and part of the lyrics ("manic depression has captured my
soul") which I don't even know if I remember correctly. And the guitar
solo doesn't sound that good.

The Velvet Underground - "Candy Says"
This is too long.

The Beatles - "Revolution 1"
As with this tape, I found
after taking this tape to my office that there was some kind of tape
speed deal. That matters more for this song than the preceding ones,
I think, because part of its charm for me is the precise pace at which
it proceeds. It makes that much more ambiguous the question of just how
much of a pessimistic sneer the song is. Slowed down on my tape, there's
a lot less doubt.

The Notorious B.I.G. - "Ready to Die"
My roommate thought that when he heard "die motherfuckers die motherfuckers
die", he was hearing the Geto Boys song from Office Space. So we
discussed the possibility of one phrase being copied from the other,
or maybe from elsewhere. But, as I suggested, the idea of wanting
motherfuckers to die is not all that original. (I suppose someone wil
tell me it's actually from a movie like Scarface or something.
Actually, I would appreciate knowing.)

B.B. Seaton & Ken Boothe - "Whole World's Down on Me"
Another one motivated by my desire for some kind of thematic connections,
but I also just wanted to put something on from the Trojan singles box
set and liked this one.

Herbert - "The Audience"
I don't always hear what I wrote about here now, but that's usually for a lack
of concentration. An example, for me, of a song that I can derive more
effect from by thinking about what I once thought about it while listening,
regardless (?) of what I still think of the song.

Green Day - "Paper Lanterns"
I notice that, like the selection in the link above, I've followed Herbert
by a Green Day song about girls. Oh well.

Kraftwerk - "Trans-Europe Express"
On disc this runs right into the next track, and my pause-button solution
to this problem is inelegant, to put it mildly. It's not quite a derailment,
though. This opens the second side. Around this time I had been thinking
of a tape that had "TEE", an MRI track, and Monk's "Kojo No Tsuki" all
next to each other, but I feel bad putting three tracks of such length
together, or even on the same tape really. Especially when they all have
this character - on and on and on.

The Sea and Cake - "Sound & Vision"
A glittering, crystalline structure that makes Bowie's song sound like
it actually came from the 80s rather than the 70s. It also makes me
deeply confused about why the band would put the cover at the end of
One Bedroom, the rest of which seems to be shown up by this
beautiful, wonderful, perfect piece of music. In my more sympathetic
moods I suspect that the juxtaposition of this with the band's own
songs is supposed to reveal something about why the originals are
actually good. But to be sympathetic I generally have to avoid listening
to this one, lest it bias me.

Pixies, "U-Mass"
Like lots of things you've heard about.

Jawbox - "Savory (live)"
At Little Tijuana last month Geoff and I heard a cover of this, I think,
so it made me nostalgic (if I can be said to be nostalgic for a song I
played a bunch two years ago). Today I was reminded that just the one
little spot where they sing "see you feign surprise" in harmony (it has
nothing to do with the words, I think) makes me well up, automatically.
I have no good idea why, beyond just that that sound makes me do that.
I think that should be enough.

The Magnetic Fields - "Meaningless"
Another thematic "choice". See how totally awful this tape would be,
as a themed tape, if it was really supposed to be? Next to everything
else here Merritt sounds especially mid-90s "ironic". But not glib
(the curse of
our generation, he says, with some sense, if by generation you mean
the people our age smart enough to be able to forego forethought but
too delighted that they could direct their intelligence to suddenly-cool
scorched-earth irony, sarcasm, and disaffectation).

Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five - "Hotter Than That"
Someday, I hope to wrap my head around this. It all passes me by,
though with some pleasure.

The Maytals - "54-46 That's My Number"
Another from the Trojan singles box. The short scat part ("da da da dee
dee dee" etc.) makes my heart leap a little, and the gloriously redlined
sound makes me wonder why latter-day analog purists never seem to make
records with this particular sound, where the equipment is older and
analog and the instruments are all "real", yes, but where everything
is all mashed together and blaring and wonderful. Or maybe there are
indie rock records that do ("lo-fi", ugh), but the things they're mashing
together don't sound so great.

Yo La Tengo - "Blue Line Swinger"
This is where I was stuck for more than a week, after thinking that
I didn't have that much fun making the tape (which was what I set out to
do, a little project to relax myself), and being unsure if I wanted to
finish it or ditch it. But this song struck me in my office one day,
as it tends to do, so I finished the tape there instead of at home.
So the speed differential got me the other way, too, since I tested
out my tape at home this afternoon. Again, it could be more to do with
my memories of the song, but it sounded a bit sluggish, and my heart
balooned and rose a little less. The "proper" CD version manages feedback
and distortion very carefully, and I suspect the differences in tone
introduced by the tape speed pushed some of that distortion from
the blissful-sounding region into the uneasy-sounding one. But overall,
I still felt happy in the end.

Mogwai - "Helicon 2"
As I heard this today I imagined (I have never seen them) Mogwai playing
this at First Avenue. I reckoned that the crowd would ruin it.

For super deep contemplative considered listening etc tonight I tracked
back Vocalcity to the one with all the vocals, whatever it's called.
It's one of the main tricks of the whole album, but I noticed it especially
here: how Luomo maintains interest in what might seem like an especially
uninteresting track by subtly transforming what a basic part is doing,
like the bassline. "What it's doing": what it sounds like, whether this
note or that note is squelched, or a bit longer, or sounds like it starts
backwards. That sort of thing. This is not a novel idea, I just really
felt aware of it tonight.

This coincides with a preoccupation with the idea of "interest" that
I've had lately, as in, the thing that a composer looks to keep, usually
despite a repetitive component to the music, or something potentially
boring. For some reason I recall often seeing the word in discussions
of composition in the western art music sense, but it's obviously relevant
to dance music. (I wonder if I might say that in many relatively
conventionalized or natural-seeming musical forms, people don't have a
problem with seeing some part as potentially boring so they never have
to confront finding a part which holds their interest. But this is
probably more of a problem relative to a given set of tastes - someone
who listens to Beethoven trying out rock music, or someone who listens
to rock music trying out Mobb Deep - than it is a problem in some
absolute, most-naturalized sense.)

I seem to have a hard time going anywhere with the idea, though.
Probably because I'm just not thinking through it enough. But often when
I start doing so I find myself thinking psychologically, and then I'm
in a strange country - I don't know what to say, or what I can or can't
say sensibly.

At the end of a Herbert remix today - "What's Your Fantasy?" probably,
because that was the repeated chorus - I noticed that even though the
hi-hat pattern that remained near the end of the song seemed pretty
dead fucking boring to me, that didn't matter because I wasn't even
really listening to it. Or at least, just listening to it: I was
using it as a way of passing time, marking time, because I expected another
cutoff "fantasy" vocal sample - it had already been made clear, I think
(even if I hadn't heard the song so many times), that there was another
one coming.

I suspect this is connected somehow with the problem I had long ago
with listening to dance music, house in particular, of only being able
to hear the kickdrum, or the hi-hat.

Read a bit from Gravity's Rainbow on my way home, from my old
copy - I still can't get into the newer one the same way. From the
section where Gustav and Saure are arguing about music - "All you feel
like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland." I must've
read it dozens of times by now. This time through I could particularly
feel myself concentrating on each word, on thinking through it, picturing
it, all that good reading stuff. I couldn't help but think of the last
thing I listened to the other night while drunk, before going to sleep -
Kind of Blue on the headphones. Even though I know that record
much better than the Pynchon, somehow it's harder for me to concentrate
on it in the same way. I expect every note - almost every note -
yet there are always little bits here or there that I miss (often passing
notes during a phrase, short ones that maybe I have trouble remembering
because I can't whistle or sing that fast?), and in part that makes me
feel like I'm always catching up, pursuing the music; the fact that it
happens in time takes part of it out of my control, or rather my ability
to consider it at my leisure.

The nice thing is that every note sounds like a really good idea. I mean,
when I'm sober the notes still sound like good ideas but now they sound like
really good ideas, really really. Can I say another 'really'? Yeah.

I know that properly to avoid being an indie caricature I should be saying
this about AOR schlock or a Christina Aguilera song or something, but man
this Gastr del Sol sounds beautiful right now. (The Christina Aguilera and
Avril Lavigne songs I heard tonight sounded beautiful too, but then pretty
much everything I heard today sounded beautiful, including ahem here
this is for you Jeff Blind Willie Johnson. How great is that?)

You know what is possibly slightly freaky when you are really drunk,
is that Gastr del Sol record, "Blues Subtitled Untitled" or whatever it's
called. Jesus, is is possible to keep things balanced in each channel
instead of flittering back and forth? Perhaps it is not.